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On Monday, eight
of the world's leading technology companies set aside their rivalries to issue
a direct challenge to U.S. lawmakers: lead the world by example and fix
America's broken surveillance state. Although the tech companies' statement
sends a powerful message, notably absent from the letter's signatories is the
appearance of a single telecommunications company, or telco.

CPJ today joined an unprecedented coalition of leading
Internet companies and civil liberty activists in the United States to press
Washington to be more open about its massive and controversial surveillance programs.

Government surveillance of electronic communications "should
be regarded as a highly intrusive act that potentially interferes with the
rights to freedom of expression and privacy and threatens the foundations of a
democratic society," Frank La Rue, U.N. special rapporteur for freedom of
expression, warned in a
report issued less than two months ago. "States should be completely
transparent about the use and scope of communications surveillance techniques
and powers." At the time, the report might have called to mind nations such as China
and Iran with high levels of state surveillance. But today, following revelations
of a broad, secret digital
surveillance program led by the U.S. National Security Agency, La Rue's words
seem instead to have been a prescient rebuke of U.S. policies.

The Syrian civil war is also a propaganda war. With the
Assad regime and the rebels both attempting to assure their supporters and the
world that they are on the brink of victory, how the facts are reported has
become central to the struggle. Hackers working in support of Assad loyalists
this week decided to take a shortcut, attacking the Reuters news agency's blogging
platform and one of its Twitter
accounts, and planting
false stories about the vanquishing of rebel leaders and wavering support
for them from abroad.

Modern technology blurs our definitions of journalism, so it's
no surprise that the first important tests of the new world should take place
in the heart of Silicon Valley. But we should take care that arguments in widely
publicized cases, such as the Apple-Gizmodo
controversy in the United States, do not set precedents that could put
journalists around the world at risk.